Writing.Com General Discussion

Backstory is like children of the 1800s. Not the ones busy working in a coal mine, but seen and not heard.

A terrible metaphor.

Almost any attempt to tell me the backstory is going to be a block of text I could have skipped. An editor could have cut out.

Now maybe the past does matter to the present as your MC returns to his hometown for the highschool reunion, and there's the current behavior of some of your classmates toward you that is directly tied to The Incident and the lead-up to it.

Or in that scene of character bonding on your way to Mount Doomicles to drop a MacGuffin in, and you tell a very short version of your backstory that somehow reveals something about your motivations.

But a lot of it can be skipped. You don't know the backstories of most the people around you. And the one that over-shares is maybe a little Too Much Info. Take a queue from that :)

Less is more.